'She's talking to that mirror again, farther?' says Misst Craddock. Father Cradock turns round slowly from the book he is eating and explains that it is just a face she is going through and they're all the same at that age.

km: "at the end of the day, it's all about growing up and getting on with your life because deep down we're all savages and all we want is a cave to sleep in and a fire and someone to club and throw over our shoulders."

I forgot 'our very own'. Variations include India's very own; Hyderabad's very own and so on.

km: this means you use 'albeit'? i shall look out for it in your posts!

swar: you should write a proper defense. we are not convinced.

veena/tr: i can see how those terms would annoy a consultant type. i see where you're coming from.

falsie: re stakeholders, i'm reminded of those Mad spoofs of cliches. you know, like the one where throwing a tantrum would mean being a champion weightlifter. of course that was in the days before facebook.

Heteroscedasticity brings back awful memories of econometrics class. It was so long back, I thankfully remember very little of it. Trust me you dont want to know what it means - has a lot to do with techniques like OLS (Ordinary least Squares) and random variables in econometric equations having constant variance. When they dont - they're heteroscedastic. (If my econometrics serves me right)

You don't have to find anything useful in it. But that's the point, nah? YOU may not find anything useful in it. That doesn't make it useless per se. In my view, all language is communication. (Which is why "Language for Communication" programs baffle me. Is there language that is not communication?)

"Deep down" is appropriate/inappropriate (note: not good/bad/ugly) only in context, not in general. To dismiss something as obtuse or convoluted is easy enough - a dash of prejudice is all you need. But to understand that style is individual and communicates soemthing - that requires discernment, perhaps?

rachel: i oughtn't to answer for falstaff, but i'm fairly certain he meant to say that platonic - in the original sense in which plato formulated it - does not mean asexual. you'll have to go back to the republic to check this one out.

I just hadn't realised there was still a fight being fought on that meaning of platonic. I had thought that (rightly or wrongly) the new if-not-improved definition of platonic was pretty much accepted alongside the old one (happily or angrily). I obviously don't know enough classical scholars...or something. Always interesting to find out what's driving people crazy!Thanksp.s. I love your Space Bar name. Platonically of course...

rachel: As SB says, I object to Platonic being used to mean asexual, since nothing Plato actually says in the Symposium suggests a lack of sex - quite the contrary. But also, I object to the way Platonic is generally used because in the modern sense Platonic relationships can be fairly casual, coming nowhere near the kind of intensity implied by the original.

(Actually, come to think of it, I once did a whole post on this - yes, here you go. Pay special attention to footnote 4, which, more than nostalgia for the way things used to be, is the reason it's a peeve)

I agree that the bastardized modern version of Platonic = asexual (why not just say asexual then?) is now widely accepted, so I should probably give up and just live with it, but I'm stubborn that way.